[David Johnson]

As always, Dave has provided some very good advice … I’ll just add a reminder not to forget a great but often overlooked resource -the AE manual. As Dave pointed out, AE is not the kind of software one can learn by just opening it up and clicking a few things to see what happens.

[David Johnson]

Perhaps the process of drawing the conclusion that your artist is inefficient should include some quantification … depending entirely on the complexity of both the foreground and background images, as well as the degree of precision that is considered necessary, isolating a person from a background normally takes most 10-20 minutes.

Having been a Photshop user probably bordering on advanced for approaching 15 years, I’ve yet to hear of a way to automate that process. A good understanding of using the Magnetic Lasso tool can make it much faster than drawing every part of a mask in some other way.

It is impossible for anyone to judge efficiency without seeing the factors mentioned above first-hand and knowing how to do what has to be done, but if your artist is taking significantly longer, perhaps a solution would be investing a minimal amount of time or money in directing him/her toward some training that would save time/money in the long run … there are endless Photoshop tutorials, training vidoes, etc. available these days, many of which are free.

[David Johnson]

Thanks much Todd.

Anyone know where I can read up on FLV cue points (in addition to the manual)? I don’t know much of Flash so I’m only guessing that cue points might better suit the need since the links need to be on text already contained in the video at specific times rather than the whole screen. However, I also need to avoid having a web designer taking the video into Flash and recompressing it since I’ll get blamed for the resulting poor quality.

[David Johnson]

Indeed hard drives are so cheap these days, I have all my work and media on 3 different externals in addition to our RAID at all times … can you tell I’ve had experiences similar to what Dave L. described!?

Especially if you need to work on various machines in different locations, I highly recommend these quad-interface drives with FW400, FW800, eSATA & USB 2.0 available from Maxx Entertainment Digital:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=133_62

Nothing in the world like the security you get knowing that you can plug into any machine at its fastest external speed and go to work!

By the way, I also highly recommend against trusting Lacie drives for media work … after having 2 fail on me within 3 years.

[David Johnson]

Thanks Todd … I’ll file a bug report ASAP.

BTW, I read the directions carefully and thoroughly several times… I always work with QT files of pretty basic old-school codecs (Uncompressed, Animation, PJPG, etc.) and they still open in footage panels regardless of file size. All my machines are CS3, they all always have the most current version of QuickTime, the Macs the most current OSX version and the Wins the most current XP version.

[David Johnson]

I guess there’s some reason you don’t want to just move the anchor point so the only other thing i can think of to avoid losing the rounded corners altogeher is to use some sort of distort effect to basically squeeze the shape, but that’ll still change the curvature of the corners.

Just thought of something else … duplicate the shape, use animated masks on both and move the postion of the one on the right.

[David Johnson]

DV will never look as good as Animation since Animation is a lossless codec and DV is not … if you want DV for some reason, you might at least try DV50 instead of DV25.

As far as any of them playing smoothly, very few computers can play uncompressed video smoothly in the QuickTime player (or any other player) … bring it into your NLE and play it to a broadcast monitor and you’ll see that it’s actually fine.

By the way, if you want to avoid having to re-render it in your NLE, you might render it out of AE using the same exact codec you’re using for the video it’ll go with in your NLE.

[David Johnson]

This thread (and others you can find by searching) might be helpful:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/953910#953986

You don’t need to learn Flash to generate FLVs or SWFs. Also note that FLVs are much better than SWFs for actual video and video graphics (vs. web graphics).

A few other things I’ll add to what’s mentioned in the thread above …

On2 Technologies Flix Exporter generates FLVs directly from AE with better quality and more controls than AE’s built-in FLV exporter. However, if you a have CS3 or higher Adobe suite, you should have Adobe Flash Video Encoder, which encodes very nice FLVs too. So, it boils down to your particular needs. If you typically export full rez from AE for non-web delivery anyway, then using Adobe’s FLV Encoder isn’t adding a step. But, if you only need web files, Flix saves a step by rendering good-quality FLVs directly from AE.

Nelson May – “Can I take the exported flash or .swf file and load it directly to the computer that programs the TV, or are there other steps I have to consider?”

I don’t understand that part since it seems whether you can load FLVs or SWFs to the computer/software that programs the playback depends on that software’s requirements, which only you can know. But, maybe this will help … most computers can’t play FLVs that haven’t been embedded into a web page or SWFs without a web browser add-on unless they have standalone players for those formats. But, there are free players available for both … “Adobe Media Player” and “Applian FLV Player” for FLVs and “GlobFX Technologies Swiff Player” or “Eolsoft Flash Movie Player” for SWFs. Each has pros and cons … i.e., Adobe’s FLV player is more consumer focused so it has a better interface/viewer, but Applian’s FLV player lets you see the metadata, etc. too.

[David Johnson]

You might try searching expressions and scripts … not really basics territory, but the only way I can think of without plugins.

[David Johnson]

You didn’t find an answer to your problem because you actually don’t have a problem … what’s happening is exactly what should happen, but it sounds like it’s not what you thought it would be … imagine an invisible box of text spinning directly in front of you in real life … because the box is invisible and the text is rotating on it in 3D space, the outgoing text is naturally visible in it’s backwards state through the empty space surrounding the front text.

You could slightly lessen the impact of that by tilting the box up so the perspective of the front text is not straight on and the back text is tilted down and a little further off in distance. If you decide to go that route, you might add some blur to the back text.

You could also make 4 instances of the comp, alternately mask out 3 of the words in each one and put them together in another comp.